In a previous article, we reported on the numerous problems the Galaxy S22 Ultra was facing when carrying out simple day-to-day tasks and theorized whether the problems were restricted to the S22 Ultra being powered by the Exynos chipsets.
This theory seems to hold true given a report by XDA Developers who took two S22 Ultras, one being powered by the Snapdragon chipset and the other the Exynos one, through some tests.
Exynos is an in-house chipset developed by Samsung and is normally shipped to Europe and a few other regions (like our own), while the Snapdragon chipset is developed by Qualcomm and Samsung devices spotting these chipsets are mainly sold in the US and the Chinese market.
XDA Developers note that despite these issues mainly occurring in Exynos-powered S22 Ultras, there are reports of users not experiencing the same difficulties despite having the exact same device.
Before starting the test, developer options were used on both devices to restrict background processes from running on the devices, while “don’t keep activities” was also enabled. The two devices were also disconnected from the internet to prevent push notifications from interfering with the test.
Performance results
First, the two phones were put through the Geekbench 5 test where the Exynos version had a score of 634 on single-core performance and, 3106 on multi-core score. This result was blown out of the water, with the Snapdragon version scoring 1092 on the single-core score and 3272 on the multi-core one.
In a test to measure how a device handles throttling and sustained performance, which is more important as users tend to use smartphones for extended periods rather than picking it up and dropping it after a short while, the Snapdragon version still comes out on top. Although in this test, the Exynos is not massively beaten by the Snapdragon’s performance.
In a different test measuring power draw from the two phones, the Exynos variant peaked at 11.84 W compared to 7.76 W drawn by the Snapdragon version. This means that despite the Exynos version having lower performance, it still manages to be more power-hungry than the Snapdragon version, which in long-term usage will lead to reduced battery life for the Exynos phone when under load.
These results were also seen in their idle state, with the Snapdragon phone losing less charge when they were both put in standby mode with no background activities going on behind the scenes.
In the final test to measure how quickly the two devices launched popular apps (think Twitter, YouTube, etc), the Exynos version took well over a second, which is pretty much unheard of for a premium flagship smartphone. This poor performance was likened to that of an entry-level device that does not have the luxury of having a top-of-the-line processor and 8 GB of RAM.
Conclusions
While Snapdragon chipsets have generally outperformed Exynos and MediaTek chipsets over the years, the performance difference in the S22 Ultra is too big for this to be a hardware issue.
It is possible that Samsung has messed up the software implementation, hampering performance in their chipsets, which could be the best-case scenario as this problem can be fixed with a software update.
However, if the issues are hardware-related, then Samsung might be dealing with phone returns from unsatisfied customers for the next few months.
